The Journey to Worlds

We all like to make stories out of our lives. This week's post is a lot different from last week's, but I see it as coming from the same part of my brain that is good at Magic - the one that is constantly churning through the world and trying to make patterns out of it, trying to recognize how my own behavior falls into these patterns, and trying to break out of them through thought and intellect alone. Learning to see this part of how my brain operates, and figuring out how to turn it off sometimes, has been one of my greatest weapons in becoming a better player this year.

I joked to some of my friends in NYC that the time after Worlds didn't exist for me yet - that's how focused I was on it as a kind of event horizon. Now that I am existing in a time that doesn't yet fully exist for me, I'm trying to make sense of what comes next, and this feels like a part of that.

I'm not totally sure what kind of story I've written.

It's a story about a privileged kid who gets to play a game they love for a year without having to worry about rent or about bombs being dropped from overhead while others in the world are suffering.

It's a story about figuring out you have to put your own oxygen mask on first, written by someone who hasn't quite finished catching their breath.

It's a story about how taking light things seriously can be redemptive but exhausting, and how taking serious things seriously can be stabilizing but self-destructive.

It's a story about how disabled people can do incredibly difficult things, written by someone whose disability might be "all in her head" (the horror!).

It's a story that felt worth writing down, and I'm taking a leap of faith on whether that means it's a story worth sharing with strangers on the internet.

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I wrote this before Trump winning the election on Tuesday, and I just wanted to acknowledge & add that while the world is dangerous and scary and always has been, after this year I am more sure than ever that there is goodness in it, and finding that goodness is worth everything. We owe it to ourselves and each other to tend to our hearts and our bodies so that we can keep living joyfully. There is no better way to fight.

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Let’s begin at the beginning of this story.

It was early November of 2023, and I was sitting in a meeting with the latest marketing consultant at my company, trying to explain the intricacies of our app onboarding to them in a way that would let them actually be helpful on the team — But in the 30 minutes my boss had given me, after the introductions and friendly getting to know each other, mostly I just had to skim over details, give the big picture, and hope they’d have enough context to do their job effectively (they wouldn’t). The worst part was that the consultant seemed aware of this, and didn’t seem particularly concerned. They were getting paid either way, and my boss likely wouldn’t know the difference between a good job and a bad one.

After I closed the zoom, I couldn’t shake the overwhelming feeling that I needed to get out of here. This had slowly, inexorably, marched from a job I had genuinely felt satisfied with and challenged by, into a nightmare of stressed out coworkers, vague assignments, and people getting fired out of the blue for seemingly getting on the wrong side of the CEO. I couldn’t handle the stress of it any longer while also managing my chronic pain, which at this point felt like a sinister force that would mold and adapt itself to any life situation I put myself in.

Pacing my apartment on a Friday afternoon, I told my roommate Mora (who worked at the same place), that I finally believed myself when I said I wanted to leave, and that I probably wanted it to happen sooner rather than later now that I knew for sure.

It felt sudden, but it wasn’t - it was cumulative.

—————

Wait, was that the beginning? Maybe it wasn't. Maybe it began in high school. Getting home exhausted from a normal day of socializing with my peers. Not realizing why this was harder for me than most, the effort it took to play the role of “nerdy but normal, social high schooler” for an entire day without letting anyone see how effortful it was.

My mask wasn’t that convincing. I barely saw any friends outside of school. Are you kidding? Spend more energy socializing when I already had homework to do? It was bad enough as it was - If I wanted any time to recharge and just be alone and breathe after dinner, I had to get my work done in the few hours before.

Did I mention I was tired? That the beginnings of a migraine were creeping up my neck into that place just behind my left eye? That didn’t matter, because the solution was rest, and the thing standing in the way of rest was work. I had to push through to earn that relief. The work earned the rest.

Did it matter that my brain was crying out to be let free, finding distraction in the smallest things, ever eager to open another tab and check Channelfireball, check dailyMTG, check facebook? It only mattered that I learned to leash it with meds, which gave me the focus needed to cross the finish line and reach those blissful few hours of freedom.

—————

Pushing through it is what I learned to do to get things done. My brain is very good at surfacing  distractions when we’re trying to do something together that we don’t want to be doing, and as of last November, I had become very good at blocking them out by gritting my teeth. It did’t always work very effectively - Many days at my remote job were long-fought battles over opening and closing twitter windows and lying down on my bed scrolling tiktok. These came between spurts of intense focus where I’d get a difficult, complex project done in a few hours that might’ve taken someone else a day of pondering and consulting others for help.

—————

Then, the pain arrived. Only now do I see the accumulation.

It came suddenly, like a literal bolt form the blue. A bolt of electrical signals shooting through my hand - one random Wednesday in September of 2020, a few months into lockdown and less than a week into our brand new apartment. The moment I finally felt settled into New York and like I had fully escaped that hellish year post-graduation where you’re working a corporate job, you miss your friends, and haven’t made any new ones. I  felt like I was finally set up, like I had reached the end of a long journey and might finally be able to take the foot off the gas a little and enjoy a life I had built for myself.

But the body keeps the score. In the weeks and months leading up to this moment, I had been scrambling between scheduling apartment tours, trying to coordinate all of our documents and payments to get approved for this one (because, of course, I was the roommate with the most executive function). I had gone shopping for furniture on the same day we moved in, stressed about getting COVID in the process (this was still the middle of lockdown, pre-vaccines), and was dealing with a horrible toothache from a tooth that I had already gotten a filling on. The tooth pain had gotten so bad that I had gotten a root canal just a few days before we were officially moved in, despite everything else going on. I was also, of course, working full time. Because that’s what you do.

In the months and years that followed, the overwhelming pain pushed me to seek answers for a spiraling problem that only seemed less and less tractable. It only got worse and more disabling as I saw specialist after specialist who seemed happy to inform me that nothing was wrong. Nothing was wrong!!!! How wonderful. The only tiny, unimportant issue was the actual deep, stabbing pain in my arms, neck, head and lower back that made it impossible to think, move, or sleep most of the time.

I cut my work schedule back to part time. I saw a physical therapist. I saw an acupuncturist. I saw multiple surgeons. I got an MRI done on my spine. I got tested for ALS. I saw a neurologist who prescribed a powerful anti-seizure medication that seemed to help a little bit, and immediately moved my work schedule back to full time. I found some exercises that seemed to help with the back pain. I found some disabled friends online who taught me to use that word to talk about myself, and what it means to exist in a world that isn’t built for you. I experienced love and heartbreak and beauty and all the other things you're supposed to experience in your 20s, but mostly I just experienced pain, and that overwhelmed the rest.

I’m not talking about sadness, or depression, or frustration, though there was plenty of that. Those I could deal with. Those feelings were normal, adaptive, rational reactions to the literal, acute, shooting, cutting, stabbing, SHOUTING signals my body was sending me that something was wrong. Something that doctors quite demonstrably couldn’t fix.

If during High School I was working with a little whisper in my ear telling me “hey, we’re really tired, maybe we could just distract ourselves for a bit and take a break”, now I was working with an asshole shouting indecipherable profanities at me as he twisted a knife into my neck, whether I was working or resting.

But I kept working, because that’s what you do — I was an adult, I had to support myself, and apparently I was able to keep this whole thing up while dealing with the worst physical discomfort I’d ever experienced. I was proud of myself for keeping up a somewhat “normal life” despite my unexplained medical condition.

—————

It felt sudden, but it wasn’t - it was cumulative. Regardless of whether my feelings about the job were grounded in bias or reality, I needed to get out of there. I recognized the feeling from the year in the corporate job postgrad - I finally knew at a molecular level that I wasn’t happy, that getting through the day was simply taking too much out of me. I’m amazed that it took so long, but to be fair, it was easy to blame the situation on the fact that I had seemingly developed a serious chronic disability out of nowhere. My job had been quite accommodating to my pain, working remotely and having a flexible schedule meant I could actually manage a full-time load despite constantly struggling with my health. I didn’t know if I’d have the same stability if I left, but I knew I valued my happiness more.

I made plans to talk to my boss in a couple weeks once I had a better plan for what to do when I left, talked to my friends, and told my parents (whose first question was “why don’t you try and look for a new job before you tell them you’re leaving so you have something already lined up?”. Classic.)

A few weeks later, I was ready to tell my boss about my plans to leave. I didn’t have a concrete plan lined up, but I’d done the emotional work to imagine different possibilities and felt confident that I’d have the drive to pursue one of them once I was out of there and had given myself a little bit of time to rest. Those possibilities included going back to working with kids either through tutoring or teaching, expanding my coding skills so I could find a more intellectually engaging (and less socially draining) job that was still remote, or (the scary one) taking a “vacation” to pursue competitive Magic for a while just to see if I could do it.

I picked a very fortunate time to open some ridiculous sealed pools, let’s just say that.

The literal weekend before I talked to my boss about leaving, my fun hobby of playing high stakes Limited on Arena with Mora turned into a real opportunity to do the scary thing. I qualified for Arena Championship 5 off of 5 wins on day 2 of the qualifier weekend, with my random high mythic placement a few months prior ensuring my leaderboard spot.

Suddenly I had a very concrete plan, at least for the next few months. It was now December, and the tournament was at the end of March. Not only did I need to leave my job, I needed to leave quite quickly if I wanted to give professional MTG a real shot! The conversation with my boss, which I’d expected to include a lot of “I’m not in a rush, let’s find a plan that works” ended up sounding a lot more like “I’m sorry to make the timeline this fast, but this is a special opportunity and I don’t want to waste it”.

—————

Before I knew it, I was free. I didn’t escape without a hectic few weeks of documenting my work to leave to my successor, but I did manage to leave within a few weeks of qualifying for Arena Champs. All that was left was me, my savings, a team of like-minded limited folks who were also qualified that I’d met through twitter (including one of my favorite content creators, Ethan Saks!), and a computer that ran Magic the Gathering Arena. Bliss.

Oh, and the pain. The pain was very much still there. It always was! Always. It was always there, screaming at me and twisting the knife into my neck, day after day, night after night. The tooth that had started this mess was back from the dead to cause more problems, and a relatively normal dental procedure had re-triggered a bad pain relapse, a pattern I was quite used to by now. During the few weeks after leaving my job, I was mostly laid up in bed just trying to endure and outlast the latest wave, frustrated that I couldn’t throw myself into preparation for the tournament.

That episode made it clear that if I was able to accomplish anything during this period of unemployment, beyond doing well at Arena Champs, I should try and make some kind of progress on my pain.

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It wasn’t very clear what that even meant, and it wasn’t very easy to believe that it would even be possible, given that I had tried many times before with little success. The one thing that had been working the past few years was weaning off of the anti-seizure medication, continuing the workouts for my back, and learning to listen to my own body and manage the pain for myself.

This work had given me enough of a baseline to know change was possible, and that gave me enough hope to seek out a new kind of therapy called Pain Reprocessing Therapy. This therapy seemed promising - It combined some of the more “talk-y” parts of traditional therapy with a more somatic approach, which felt like it acknowledged the physical, tangible reality of my condition more than CBT-like therapies.

The first few sessions didn’t feel very helpful, but it did feel like I was learning some useful skills. Most of what we talked about were things I was already doing — mindfulness and relaxation techniques that I found temporarily helpful for the pain but had also been doing for a while and didn’t address the bigger picture.

Arena Champs went well, and I qualified for Worlds.

The dream continued!

The biggest thing I felt was a sense of relief. I had earned myself some more time where thinking about Magic and working on my pain was a legitimate pursuit, and solving these problems could be a full-time “workload”.

I kept grinding Magic, and writing, and living as slowly as I could outside of that - taking long walks through the city listening to audiobooks, playing videogames, reading books in the park.

The pain stayed with me, a constant companion. I wrote this piece about it and shared it with my therapist. And then…………

…

…

…

Then, he finally said something that really hit me.

“Ryan, all this trying to take care of yourself still sounds like a lot of mental effort. Have you tried taking a break from that too?”

Of course, I had tried to do this. But something about being challenged on a description of my pain, how it was only able to be managed in the short term, how slowing down and listening to it instead of trying to actively manage my schedule around taking care of a body that constantly felt like it was failing felt like work in and of itself, like I couldn’t escape because I was always working, made me realize that I might not actually be letting myself LET GO as much as I thought I was.

That I was still pushing through discomfort to try and earn comfort.

That I didn’t know how to shut it off anymore — The churning, the worrying, the analysis, the optimization, the healthy attitude, the carefully planned schedule, the desire to be Doing the Right Thing, to be Accomplishing Goals, to be Earning my Rest.

Maybe rest was just something I desperately needed right then, not something I had to accomplish for myself through careful planning and execution and problem solving.

Maybe I couldn’t be thinking so much all the time, because my brain couldn’t handle it.

Maybe learning to ignore my thinking brain's pleas to stop and shut off and recharge had forced it into the only communication I would at least hear, even if I didn’t listen to it: causing me intense physical discomfort until I actually let the whirring, grinding, churning analysis machine rest.

I could feel my feet on the grass? I could see the other people in Brooklyn Bridge Park and watch them having fun, without needing to check my phone? I felt like time was slowing down, instead of speeding up? That’s weird.

—————

So anyways, Duskmourn spoilers were starting to come out. The Regional championship was in a month, and Worlds is in less than 2. I’d made a lot of progress on my pain, but it was time to get serious about achieving my silly dream.

Don’t get me wrong - The pain progress was going to be a very crucial part of this. I didn't want to lose the thread of hope, the attachment to my body I’d so recently found, just learn to incorporate it into a period of my life where pushing my analytical brain to its realistic limit was a goal that I cared about almost as much.

The September before the RC was a careful dance. I knew October was going to be insane, and I didn’t want to burn myself out before it even started, but I also knew getting some of the work done ahead of time would make things a lot easier. Treating a marathon like a sprint doesn't go well in either direction.

Most days looked like playing Magic in few-hour bursts, interspersed with pain management activities like walks, workouts, baths, naps, and the occasional favorite “floor time”. Some days required more sacrifice on the body maintenance front to play tournaments, and sometimes I needed to take day-long breaks from thinking about Magic at all (which were mostly pretty successful).

A couple weeks in, I locked in my deck choice for DC - Going with a deck that challenged me in Phoenix, one that I thought I couldn’t play well enough to succeed in the AC, but now felt like I had tackled the learning process for. But feeling prepared for DC was just the pre-work -- Reaching the end of that prep let me intentionally spend more time on standard and DSK draft for Worlds.

Being responsible for mastering multiple formats left me feeling rushed and exhausted. I never felt like I was doing enough, like there was enough time in the day to actually be ready for these tournaments, the ones that would decide the future of my Magic career.

Rushing led to dragging, and before long I felt like I’m wasn't learning at all because I was in too much pain. I felt myself tilting at small results, running through red intuition lights, and only caring about the destination of whether I won a particular draft or league.

I needed a mental break. I tried to take one in the couple days before DC, barely playing any Magic and seeing a college friend for dinner the night before who knows nothing about the game. I told her about all the progress I’d been making on the pain this year. It’s easier to say these things in person than over text to someone who knows you deeply from a past era of your life. I heard about her work and her family for the first time in a while - she’s doing well and that filled me up.

RC DC went incredibly well. I battled back from 1-2 to make day 2 at 7-2, and while I was pretty quickly out of PT contention on day 2, I noticed I didn't really mind, which felt odd but welcome. I just felt like I was playing well and having a great time playing Magic against some really excellent people, and that was enough.

I met so many new friends from Sanctum that weekend, including a high schooler who reminded me of myself at that age (an uneasy person reacting to their placement in the world, not someone trying to imitate confident personalities until they find one that feels real), and his parent, who also felt like much more of a real person to me now than friends’ parents did when I was younger and had insightful thoughts about my pain. Being in your 20s is weird.

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Back from DC, it became clear that I was very exhausted. The experience itself felt mostly like I was able to power through it, but the toll it took on my body was much easier to feel now that I was back home in my routines. It was hard to sit down and play Magic without my neck and tooth pain flaring up. I could feel the rushing feeling, like I’m running out of time.

I only had a few weeks before Worlds, and I wasn't even good at the only deck the team was seeming to coalesce on. But I knew I wouldn’t be able to learn it like this - so I took my sweet, sweet time, not letting my brain latch back onto Magic until I was quite confident that it was reaching for it out of desire for something chew on slowly, not just discomfort with the stillness.

One of these rest days, while I was in the park reading, I sent one of my closest friends this text:

But that thought would have to wait.

After a few days back home, I was able to get back to playing Magic that feels deep and tangible, like I’m actually finding the crevices of my own brain where things are tangled and untangle them. My instincts for how to play with Otters were starting to track with my teammates’, some of whom the deck “clicked” for more immediately.

But this work was still exhausting. Many days into it, after a second day of in-person testing in our apartment (gotta get practice with how to execute the combo in paper and explain it to your opponent!), I felt like I couldn't possibly do another disciplined game log review - my mind would want to rush through it, to skip ahead to the answer and get rid of this uncomfortable feeling that we need to know what’s going to happen now, that the surprise of each new moment is not worth waiting for.

The only issue is that we were leaving for Vegas in just over a day, and I still felt pretty behind in my Limited prep.

Drafting is kind of like taking a break, right?

It’s definitely better than playing more Constructed. I drafted almost nonstop in the day leading up to our flight to Vegas, and it was actually pretty refreshing to let my brain go back to solving a problem it enjoys. All I had to worry about was limited until we were settled in the testing house.

Well, that and packing, flying across the country, meeting a bunch of new people, grocery shopping, and continuing to try and give myself space to just breathe and experience it without succumbing to the rush of everything. But I'd gotten pretty good at that. The flight to Vegas felt like the easiest one I’d had in years.

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I don’t know how I was so surprised by the deep weirdness and goodness of living in a Magic testing house for a week, but I was. It was like stepping through a portal into a bizzaro world where Magic was a thing that everyone cared about and thought deeply about. Like something a family would talk about over dinner.

I met some very special people this week. (Okay, I knew Jason and Nicole before, but can we just say that I really met them during testing week or something sappy like that?)

Nicole was the group’s voice. She I think tapped into the feeling that week that best represented all of us - a confident player who nevertheless mostly operated through self-reflection and a healthy amount of self-doubt, who understood how hard this thing we do is but also how joyful it can be. She also trophied multiple drafts where she thought her deck sucked and lost a few where she thought it was good. A truly relatable figure and friend.

cft existed at the opposite end in a way - removed from the group physically, but just as, if not more dialed in as the rest of us, constantly pushing to see if we could find better plans especially for the red matchups, and completely willing to challenge consensus as it came up. I noticed how much the rest of the team made sure to take cft’s challenges seriously. Not only because they're a brilliant and innovative player, but we knew that because they were “in the house” in a different way from the rest of us, their opinions were a way to check our own. I'm glad they set an example all week for why Working the way You Work needs to be part of everyone’s process.

Nate fit into the house as smoothly as butter. He saw ahead of time that we’d need extra table space and brought a card table in on the first day with his brother. I noticed him cleaning while others tested (to be fair, everybody did this to different extents), and I saw him consistently enthusiastic for others to help him learn where he was weaker and to help them where he was stronger. He was also definitely our scariest red player.

Etienne was, obviously, the coolest person on the team. This is not just a comment about their impeccable style, but it doesn’t hurt the whole persona. They exuded gentle positivity in every situation, reminding us how it was important to be getting sleep too, all while being a frighteningly intuitive Magic player who could pick things up faster than should be realistically possible.

Minh somehow stood out for his kindness and humor in a house where no one lacked in either of those qualities. Always able to crack the perfect silly joke whenever anyone was feeling stressed, always willing to be the villain during testing so others could get practice with Otters, always making sure to give everyone constructive feedback and encouragement in equal measure, and of course, being an intimidatingly good player to boot. As Minh would say, I’m Minh for that!

Claire was the least outspoken, but the most careful thinker out of all of us. When she made a point, everyone listened, and it was almost always something we agreed needed to be said. She was the veteran who had been here before -- You had to be careful not to say anything that could be interpreted as nerves in front of her, because she'd be quick to remind us that "everybody bleeds" and we belonged here. She also "got" the otters deck in a way none of us besides Jason really did.

Mora was so integrated into the team that we regularly forgot she wasn't playing in the event. Always offering to be the villain in testing, always willing to play whatever role was needed, not scared at all to hold her own in a house of killers -- A competitor in the truest sense, in it entirely for her deep love of the game and drive to help others.

Jason was the best thing a leader can be - someone who takes the job on simply because no one else wants to and because they care that it gets done. Despite leading meetings, organizing most practical things in the house, and being the champion of the Otters deck and the voice of authority on technical play with it, I never felt like Jason was anything other than a friend and collaborator along with the rest of us. It makes a lot of things look easy that are actually not at all; this is one of them.

—————

It became hard during that week to get my brain to rest, to stop it thinking about anything besides Magic. When you try to think about something you're incredibly interested in for 12+ hours a day, it's not as easy to get your mind off of it as taking a walk before bed, or at least it wasn't that easy for me. Despite the time difference ostensibly making us want to go to sleep earlier, I found myself tossing and turning with worries about the tournament and our deck choice many hours past when I had said I was exhausted and done with Magic for the day.

Running on overdrive like this was some of the most intellectual fun I've ever had, and it was also physically exhausting. By the end of the week my head was pounding, my pain was back stronger than ever, and I was desperate just for a cold, dark, quiet room where I could close my eyes and breathe for a few hours.

Mora had been kind enough to find a hotel room near the convention center with ample floor space so that I could sleep on the floor (as had been my practice while traveling for years due to the back pain), but was also kind enough to give me the real bed and not the pullout couch after my preferences changed right before the trip, so the afternoon before Worlds, I was able to make that cool, quiet nap a reality.

I remember waking up feeling refreshed and excited to go to the players' party, and I remember feeling weirded out that there were so many people here who I recognized from my computer, but didn't recognize me and it felt weird to introduce myself to.

I remember wanting cft to draft with us, but also realizing I wanted to leave just like they did immediately after I said so.

I remember, like an observer, watching my thoughts iterate pointlessly over the possible outcomes of the following day while tried to fall asleep the night before Worlds, realizing how much of an effect the thinking was having on my body while feeling both disinvested from it and powerless to stop it.

I don't remember falling asleep, but I do remember waking up 10 minutes before my alarm, grateful that I had at least been able to lose that ever-exhausting thread of consciousness eventually.

Everything else was just playing Magic.